UNDER CONSTRUCTION — The exhibition archive is to give international visibility and accessibility to East European art events, and to enable cross-national research and comparisons. With the collaboration of international experts essential data of exhibitions and event series of key importance are collected and contextualized.

Opening at Luzhniki Stadium. Captions: (top) the guests liked Moscow’s ice-cream from the first day; (bottom) the Norwegians are easy to spot by their knit caps. Photos: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin).

Muscial concert at the Central House of Workers in the Arts (TsDRI). Captions (clockwise from left): American folk singers Peggy Seeger and Guy Carawan; Jeff Ellison presenting his quintet; J.E. and his jazz band. Photos: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin).

Public discussing artworks on view in the Italian Hall of the Exhibition of Paintings, Gorky Park. Photo: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin).

Work by French painter Paul Rebeyrolle, “Boy with his Dead Dog,” on view at the festival. Photo: Igor Palmin (courtesy of Igor Palmin)

Organized by: Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Communist Youth League (Komsomol)

Location: Moscow

The sixth World Festival of Youth and Students took place over two weeks in the summer of 1957, bringing over 30,000 foreign guests to the Soviet capital with the stated goal of promoting peace and friendship. After the isolation of the Stalin years, the Festival played a major role in opening up Soviet society to the West, as Soviet visitors encountered Western consumer goods, jazz music, and modernist art for the first time, and mingled with guests from abroad. For many young artists, the painting exhibitions, coming on the heels of the hugely successful Picasso retrospective at the Pushkin Museum the previous year, were a revelation. Many unofficial and nonconformist artists of the 1960s generation attribute their later bold explorations of modernist idioms to this formative experience.

The photographs presented here were shot by Igor Palmin, a recently-graduated geology student at the time, who had obtained a coveted ticket to the opening festivities at Luzhniki Stadium. He managed to document many of the Festival’s delegations and crowded cultural events, assembling the shots into a handmade annotated album, from which these pages are taken. In the following decades, Palmin would become one of the most prolific documentarians of the Soviet artistic underground as well as a distinguished photographer for such publications as Iskusstvo, Sovetskii khudozhnik, and Sovetskii pisatel. His portraits of unofficial artists in their studios and candid shots of special gatherings convey something of the warmth of underground social life in the last decades of the Soviet Union.

In the period the art historian Elona Lubytė termed ‘silent modernism’ (1962–1982), unofficial exhibitions were held not only in artists’ studios or residences, but also in various non-art institutions that were home to patrons of modern art and exhibition-initiators. Among the most significant institutions were the club of the LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) Writers’ Union, the LSSR State Conservatory, the Urban Planning Institute, the Vaga publishing house (all based in Vilnius), and the Panevėžys Drama Theater, led by the acclaimed director Juozas Miltinis, who cultivated avant-garde ideas in his stage productions. According to contemporaries, the control of the art events that took place inside these institutions was less strict, yet these exhibitions were not advertised by official posters or covered by the press; in other words, they did not receive public attention or official evaluation. Artists’ works were exhibited in lobbies, hallways, offices, and sports and concert halls. Sometimes the unusual exhibition spaces spawned alternative approaches to displaying works of art.

Tamás Szentjóby planned an exhibition entitled “Donor” in July 1968, in the Iparterv State Architectural Office, but it was cancelled after the invitation leaflet was printed and distributed. Three months later and three weeks before the famous first Iparterv exhibition he organized actions entitled “Do You See What I See” in the same location with Miklós Erdély and László Méhes. In the “Iparterv 68-80″ catalog issued in 1980 Erdély described these actions as his connection to the Iparterv group.

The hall of the Iparterv Office was not used regularly for exhibitions and the shows were open only for a few days. The first famous group show presenting the “first generation of the neo-avantgarde” in 1968 was accompanied by a small catalog containing a short introduction by the curator, Péter Sinkovits and the reproduction of the works and the CVs of the participants.

In 1969 four more artists, András Baranyay, László Méhes, János Major, and Tamás Szentjóby accepted Sinkovits’ invitation. A year later a catalog was printed illegally in the printing house of the Iparterv Office with a slightly different list of artists (Tamás Szentjóby and Sándor Molnár was left out, Miklós Erdély and Attila Pálfalusi included).

In 1980 a commemorating exhibition was initiated by art historian László Beke (1944) and Lóránd Hegyi (1954). On this occasion a comprehensive English-Hungarian publication was issued containing several studies and also documents of the previous exhibitions in addition to the works of the participants. Finally, shortly before the Regime Change, in December 1988 a three-part “Hommage à Iparterv” series was organized in the Fészek Gallery by Lóránd Hegyi.

Opening of the exhibition – radio action (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

Opening of the exhibition (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

Opening of the exhibition (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

The interior with György Jovánovics and István Nádler (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

The exhibition (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

The exhibition (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

The exhibition (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

The exhibition (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

György Jovánovics’s sculpture in his studio
before the exhibition. Photo: András Baranyai (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

Event in the garden of Miklós Erdély with the sculpture of György Jovánovics. Photo: György Erdély (courtesy of György Erdély and György Jovánovics)

Event in the garden of Miklós Erdély with the sculpture of György Jovánovics. Photo: György Erdély (courtesy of György Erdély and György Jovánovics)

Event in the garden of Miklós Erdély with the sculpture of György Jovánovics. Photo: György Erdély (courtesy of György Erdély and György Jovánovics)

Design by György Jovánovics for his page in the catalog Hungarian Artists (Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 1972), for which he used a photograph taken at the opening (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

Design by György Jovánovics for his page in the catalog Hungarian Artists (Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 1972), for which he used a photograph taken at the opening (courtesy of György Jovánovics)

Invitation leaflet of György Jovánovics’s lecture, “The Best Work of My Life”
(courtesy of György Jovánovics)

Date: 15 March 1970

Participants: György Jovánovics (1939), István Nádler (1938)

Opening action with János Frank (1925 – 2004)

Location: Adolf Fényes Hall, Budapest

The Adolf Fényes Hall was a gallery offered for the presentation of tendencies that were not supported but tolerated by the official cultural politics. In addition to István Nádler’s geometric paintings György Jovánovics exhibited ahuge plaster sculpture, whose shape was repeating to the ground plan of the gallery. The exhibition was opened by a fictive radio program that – after the most important international news of the day reported on the exhibition itself . After the exhibition, Jovánovics transported the work to Miklós Erdély’s garden, where the sculpture became the setting for a number of spontaneous events, some of which were documented in photographs. Later Jovánovics called this work, more precisely the opening “the best work of my life” in a lecture reconstructing the event held in Artpool Art Research Center. In the 1980s it also inspired János Sugár (1958) to make an exhibition and shoot a film in the same location.

The joint initiative of three artists—Stano Filko, Miloš Laky, and Ján Zavarský—left behind the sphere of science and technology in order to reach a spatial experience of the color white, and to equate painting to a mystical experience. White paint was applied, without any personal gesture, onto various objects and materials (i.e., carton tubes, felt)—it considered as a sign of transcendence beyond the the boundaries of the objective world. In a joint manifesto, the authors removed themselves from all systems of representation in order to fulfill the following goals: to create a visual equivalent of an empty space and in a sense to dematerialize art objects to exceed individuality; to clear away a single author’s personal perspective; and to negate traditional means of painting in visual art. The project was exhibited in the House of Arts, Brno (1973) and in the Young Artists Club, Budapest (1977). Two self-published catalogs by the artists were published, accompanied by a manifesto, and texts written by Jiří Valoch, Tomáš Štrauss, and László Beke.

This exhibition of photorealist works by fourth year Art Academy students Miervaldis Polis and Līga Purmale was the first serious manifestation of its kind not just in Soviet Latvia, but also in the wider region. It was unprecedented for students to organize an exhibition on their own initiative open to all outside the academy. To make it happen, the artists had to collect recommendations and permits from almost ten different institutions. The artists vividly recall[1] an episode in which members of the Central Committee suddenly turned up at the exhibition, apparently on the basis of an anonymous report that one of the paintings made a mockery of Lenin. But while the painting Brass Band (1974) did have a figure of a little trumpet player in a peaked cap in the foreground, it bore no resemblance to the proletariat leader.

At one of the exhibition’s public discussions, the artists were approached by Estonian art enthusiast Matti Miliuss, who subsequently arranged for the exhibition to be presented at the Deaf Persons’ Society in Tartu and the Tallinn Art Institute in Estonia.

The exhibition gained a lot of public attention despite receiving no press coverage. This resonance was connected with the unabashedly photorealist and hyperrealist manner of painting. The exhibited works formally complied with the official line of Soviet art—realism—but in reality they were much closer to contemporary trends in Western art. The professional art scene greeted the young artists with a mixture of genuine admiration and resigned or harsh criticism, but in time Purmale and Polis would come to be regarded as masters of the genre.

In the period of 1975-1979 a group of artists and friends (later dubbed “Group of Six Artists”) — Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović — organized a series of twenty-one “exhibition-actions.” With the exception of Demur, who graduated painting at the Zagreb Academy of Arts, the group members were not trained as visual artists, but rather approached the “new art practice” from other fields, such as poetry (Martek), photography (Sven Stilinović, Vučemilović), amateur photography (Jerman), amateur film (Mladen Stilinović). This determined their shared anti-aesthetic, anti-programmatic and anti-professional stance to art production, resulting in experiments with photography, poetry, text, concepts, ephemeral interventions and actions, as well as exhibition experiments. The initial distance from academic and art institutions led them to the concept of “exhibition-actions,” a series of self-organized public presentations of their work, initially taking place in the open, public spaces of the city and its surroundings: the streets and squares of the Zagreb city center, residential neighborhoods, the river banks, beaches, university hallways.

In his chronology of the group’s activities, Darko Šimičić traces the group’s self-organized presentations to the action performed on the night of the 9th of October 1974, when three group members (Demur, Jerman, Martek) intervened on the advertising board under the railway bridge of Savska Street in Zagreb. In this action, Jerman presented his famous slogan “This Is Not My World,” written in hypo on photographic paper. According to Šimičić, “[t]his illegal exhibition in a public site was to become in somewhat modified form the prototype [of] the later group appearances.” 1 The first exhibition of the whole group took place on the 11th of May at the Sava River public bathing site: works were installed along the embankment, on sunbathing boards, and the grass. The term “exhibition-action” was first used to describe their second collaborative exhibition, which took place on the 29th of May, at the Zagreb neighborhood Sopot, part of the newly-urbanized zones of the “New Zagreb” built during the 1950s and 1960s. In their exhibition-actions, the artists exhibited paintings, photographs, installations, objects, as well as performed actions. For example, in the Sopot exhibition-action, Jerman showed two childhood photographs pasted on styrofoam boards: one in which he became member of the pioneer organization, and the other where he received his first Holy Communion. Mladen Stilinović showed paintings from the cycle Me, You, Mine, Yours, and performed an action of jumping up in order to appear higher than the skyscrapers in the background.

The group’s public presentations gained more visibility and attention with their October 1975 exhibition at the Republic Square, the central square in Zagreb. Jerman exhibited his “elementary photographs,” along with the slogan “Life, and not slogans”; Sven Stilinović showed a series of photos of a dead dog juxtaposed with photographs deemed to possess artistic beauty; Mladen Stilinović handed out photos of smiles to passers-by; Demur pasted the advertisement board with the poster on which only the word “Eto” [There you go] was written; Vučemilović asked the passer-by to take a photo of him. Judging from the reactions that the artists recorded and later published in one of the issues of their Maj 75 magazine, Zagreb citizens were not impressed, dubbing the exhibition “international idiocy” and seeing it as a symptom of disease, or simply students’ immaturity and idleness. Polemics in the newspapers ensued when a local art critic dismissed the artistic validity of the action. 2

An interesting twist to the form of exhibition-action was added with the May 1976 action City Walk, in which the artists walked through the streets of Zagreb, carrying their paintings, photographs and art objects. Demur carried a black painting with the text “I’m not crazy to paint bourgeois paintings” written in red. In June of the same year, they staged an exhibition-action on the beach of Moščenićka Draga. Jerman laid on photo-paper, leaving behind the imprint of his body; Martek performed an action of tearing banknotes: “In my opinion there is no greater contradiction than the contradiction between the sea as a reality and a the money as an abstraction.” 3 Sven Stilinović painted beach stones, while Vučemilović, who was not present, declared the movements of Jerman to be his own art (live sculptures). Several works testify to the centrality of the dematerialized idea of art for the group’s work: art — as well as collective and collaborative work — was conceived as a process, and a form of immediate sharing that cannot be reproduced or materialized. For example, Demur made a series of “mental works,” works that were not realized and that were forgotten: “I left my mental process of action in its original form without translating it into communication of any kind whatsoever.” 4 Similarly, Mladen Stilinović stated that part of the works conceived for the exhibition-action “was neither produced, noted down, now memorized. It was lived with friends.” 5

Starting from 1977, several exhibition-actions took place in gallery spaces. For the January 1978 exhibition at the Nova Gallery in Zagreb, the artists played with the idea of “oral tradition.” Keeping the tradition of their street presentations, the concept required a mandatory presence of the artists next to their work exhibited in the gallery, so that they could engage in conversations with the visitors and communicate their ideas about each particular work, as well as more general ideas on art. In June 1968, in the framework of the April Encounters festivalin Belgrade, the group decided to organize a public working meeting at the SKC Gallery, making the very workings of the group and the plotting of their contributions to the festival transparent to the audience. This idea of openness, communication, and sharing was central to the group, and resonated with other artistic and curatorial practices that engaged in the conversations around the “democratization of the arts” that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. However, also crucial was the idea of self-organization and autonomy, and the freedom from institutional and ideological conditioning and censorship. Alongside the unique concept of “exhibitions-actions,” the group’s samizdat “catalogue-magazine” Maj 75, initiated in 1978, as well as their engagement in Podroom — the Working Community of Artists from 1978-1980, became additional platforms through which the group strove to achieve these aims.

After the Bulldozer and Izmailovsky Park exhibitions that took place in the autumn of 1974, some unofficial artists were emboldened to seek more opportunities to show their work in public. Their efforts resulted in a series of significant exhibitions the following year that included an exhibition of painting at the Beekeeping Pavilion, DK VDNKh on February 19–22, 1975, by twenty Moscow-based artists. A two-part apartment exhibition series titled “Apartment Previews in Advance of the All-Union Exhibition” also took place at private addresses in the hope of convincing the Ministry of Culture to mount a union-wide exhibition. (First exhibition: March 29–April 5, 1975, eight apartments, 132 artists, 741 works; Second exhibition: April 23–27, 1975, six apartments, 163 artists, 726 works). Finally, the “Exhibition of Works by Moscow Artists” at DK VDNKh took place September 20–30, 1975. Each exhibition was not without difficulty. Local authorities used many tactics to intimidate artists and limit participation including the exclusion of artists not based in Moscow, threats to participants (i.e., Nadezhda Elskaia was threatened with the removal of her daughter; others with loss of work or living space; threat of psychiatric intervention), delays with the hanging of the show or difficulty installing the works, and obstacles created for the public audience members such as long queues, closed cafes and toilets. A total of 145 unofficial artists submitted artworks for the exhibition, but after much back-and-forth between the group of organizers and the administration, only 122 Moscow artists were allowed to participate. The exhibition at the DK VDNKh attracted huge crowds who were forced to wait in line for hours to gain entry. Two of the more controversial works exhibited were Hippie Flag by the group Volosy [Hair], and the action Hatch Eggs! by the collaborative trio of Mikhail Roshal (1956–2007), Victor Skersis (b. 1956), and Gennady Donskoi (b. 1956) who were later called the Nest. The latter work consisted of a pile of branches and leaves in the shape of a nest, two meters in diameter, and was installed directly on the floor of the exhibition hall. Viewers were invited to sit in the structure in order to “hatch eggs”; signs nearby stated: “Quiet! Experiment in progress!” According to Roshal, the Ministry of Culture had threatened to remove Hatch Eggs!, but the other exhibitors refused to help and it remained in place, becoming a place where people would sit, eat, drink, and socialize. Eventually, the work was destroyed when the authorities declared it a fire hazard and soaked it with a fire extinguisher.

The “Group Exhibition of Painting” was only open for a few days. A public presentation with the artists on the occasion of the exhibition at the LSSR Art Workers’ Palace was held on December 22, 1977. The event was moderated by the art critic Alfonsas Andriuškevičius (1940).

He recalls, “During a discussion of the exhibition, I simply moved from the work of one artist to the work of another, and interpreted them, giving slight hints at an evaluation. Again, I tried to show how the more innovative means of expression worked. Yet it was mostly artists who participated in the discussion, and so there did not seem to be any very skeptical reactions to these means of expression. Nevertheless, the participating painters were interested in hearing interpretations of their work, and in receiving a few critical insights, although I was by no means an authoritative figure.” Later, “during discussions of Valentinas Antanavičius’s and Eugenijus Antanas Cukermanas’s exhibitions at the Conservatory [in 1981 and 1982, respectively], I mostly had to explain to the public their unconventional means [assemblage and abstract art] of expression (for us), and to prove their legitimacy and functionality. Part of the audience was clearly averse to such art. Besides, I tried to demonstrate that those means of expression produced important meanings, and I tried to counteract the idea that they were just empty, formalist games.”[1]

This underground exhibition-auction took place in the Belarusian Art and Theater Institute in Minsk (now known as the Academy of Arts). Participants included students from the Institute, and untrained artists or painters. Artists exhibited their work for sale so that other artists and friends could buy the work in exchange for a token payment.. This was the first attempt to exhibit (and sell) artists’ works outside of the official selection and ranking of the work.

Exhibition “1+1+1+1+1=6″. The visit of the official committee appointed by Ministry of Culture and government agency, which later banned the exhibition. House of Writers’ Union. Minsk, 1985. Photo from Adam Hlobus’ archive. Courtesy: “pARTisan”.

The exhibition was organized with support from the Union of Writers, thanks to the efforts of Viktar Karamazau, Mikhas Stratsou and Maksim Tank. Nevertheless, the authorities banned the exhibition even before it was opened. Union of Painters allowed using their premises for a day-long exhibition of paintings. Number of official painters, among which were well-known Mikhail Savitsky and Zair Azgur, subjected the exhibition to heavy-handed criticism blaming the participants in betrayal of socialist realism. The show was met with great appreciation in Belarus artistic circles and stands out as the first open attempt to show to the public new artistic forms and ideas.

During the 1960s, Josip Vaništa created a series of paintings in which a thick, horizontal, monochrome line was set against a monochrome background. The paintings were part of his experiments towards formal and narrative reduction, which characterized his individual work, as well as the work of the Zagreb-based Gorgona group (1959-66) of which he was a founding member. 1 Twenty-two years after the group’s regular activities ended, joined by two other Gorgona members, Vaništa performed Deposition, an action in which his 1968 painting, Black Line on Silver Background, was left in the snowy forest landscape near Zagreb. Performed during the era of the “return of painting” in the 1980s, Vaništa’s action seemed to rather return painting to its end. In fact, by staging a crossing between the black line horizontally cutting through the glimmering, silver background of the canvas, and the upright, elongated bodies of the black tree trunks interrupting the white, glimmering purity of the snow, Deposition wasa pronouncement of a whole series of deaths. The death, not merely of art, but consequently also that of nature, or rather, the vanishing of the line that had served to separate, and thus keep them alive. Another cross was planted by the 1968-1986 inversion, marking the birth and the death of Vaništa’s painting, and commemorating the very death of time, or a special kind of time, which, in the 1960s, was still able to dream about its artistic and political future, while in 1980s it was merely able to acknowledge its futile deposits. The 1980s were the time when Vaništa marked the death of Gorgona, through his Postgorgona samizdats, nostalgic documents of the history and myth of the group and a forever lost spiritual community. 2Deposition was, above all, a peculiar kind of exhibition of all these deaths, meticulously arranging its ghosts as the objects to be displayed for a yet unknown audience of the snowy forest. It is this act of exhibiting which nonetheless keeps a certain anticipatory time alive, and with it, the persistence of the Gorgonic engineering of the impossible, like in Đuro Seder’s “Collective work” exhibition scenarios, with which this chronology began.

Location: Republic House of Artists of Belarusian Theatre Union, Minsk

The idea for this exhibition came from Andrej Pliasanau who commissioned independent painters (meaning not associated to the Artists’ Unions) to produce works on the theme of the “painter’s studio.” It was the first time that an exhibition of individual artists’ work from a private collection was organized. It included sixty-four artworks by thirty-nine artists, and was one of the first major group exhibitions of independent art. Approximately four hundred people attended the exhibition opening, and 150–200 viewers came to see the show in the following days.

The big-scale exhibition has become a legend of the 1980s. It is believed to be a starting point in the history of Belarusian art. The opening of the exhibition was banned and the participants under the guidance of Andrej Pliasanau and Aliaksander Dabravolsky started a demonstration and protest action. They headed towards City’s Party Committee (Gorkom) carrying posters and paintings. As a result, they got permission to open the exhibition.

The exhibition of artists group called “BLO Association” in the House of Cinema (now – The Red Cathedral) comprised individual and collectively-produced paintings, installations and performances. “The Songs of a Superman” was performed by Artur Klinau at the opening. The exhibition was the first group show presenting the works of artists who were not associated with official Art Academy and felt unrestrained in their methods and approaches. As opposed to ‘academic’ artists who emphasized the importance of the early avant-garde tradition, geometrical abstraction, picture-based works, they used pop-culture imagery and trash in their installations.